We’ve been really pleased with the contributions people have made to the blogging section of the site since it relaunched back in March. And it seems to be popular with a lot of the members of our community, judging by the hits and Twitter attention some of the posts are getting.
But eight months is a long time in social media. And we took the decision to improve a few elements of the blogging experience.
Images and video
Probably the best upgrade we’ve made is to make it much easier for authors to include images and video content in their posts. By clicking the ‘tree’ image:
you can upload an image to any area of your blog. And by clicking on the ‘video tape’ icon:
YouTube videos are instantly embeddable too.
Preview/edit
We’ve also added edit functionality to the posting procedure. Once you’ve typed out your blog, added your images and uploaded an appropriate video, you can now preview exactly how your blog will look when posted to the site. On this screen you can then either decide to save and publish to the live site or edit your blog in the unlikely instance that you discover a spelling mistake hidden in your copy. It looks like this:
Personal pages
In addition to these functionality changes we’ve also cleaned up the appearance of this area slightly, bringing a greater level of ownership to each author. Your profile pictures now feature prominently at the top of each blog post you make, as well as a new link that sends readers through to a page featuring a chronological collection of all the posts you’ve added to the site.
You’ll notice it at the top of this blog:
Hopefully these updates will add further to the success of the community, which we’ve enjoyed seeing grow since earlier in the year.
Let us know what you think (especially if you think it’s great).
And watch this space as we’re looking to add further to this area of the site in the future.
